I already mentioned Notepad2 in a past blog post: It's a nice little free Notepad replacement that meets my requirements for a program that is similar to, but slightly better than the original, with a fast startup.

That's why it makes me sad to read about what has happened to the author, Florian Balmer: Somebody took the (GPLed) source code of Notepad2, changed a few lines and released it as an "improved version" called Notepad3 to various download sites. In theory there's nothing wrong about this as the licensing conditions are met, but some kind of unpleasant aftertaste remains to put it mildly.